BQ-07: To Ko-Boldly Go

Having slain an it's-not-just-a-phase (Mom) spider and finding a secret attempt to smuggle the not-so-smuggly phase spider to the silk merchant, Lady Akunai, McSneakle decides that he's done dealing with all this bullshit nonsense and returns to the boat with his frog slave. Valor, 🌱, and Zanzibar stay to examine the spent magic scroll that summoned the phase spider, and Zanzibar recognizes an apple-shaped stamp that he knows as an ancient sign of Guga, the chaos god that Kinchasa stands as a monument against.

Zanzibar suggests that Lady Akunai is in gadzooks-kahoots with Guga!

What a bitch!

Valour wants to investigate the case further, but telling the Manzibar and Odah about it would be a pretty smart thing, right? So they set off back to the Manzibar's house. While there, they divulge their discoveries, specifically that Lady Akunai is involved in a plot involving the chaos god, Guga.

The Manzibar thanks them and says that he'll deal with of Lady Akunai, but if there is chaos brewing, it must be staunched! This summoning letter came from somewhere in the city, right? Kinchasa must forever be a bastion against chaos! He suggests that the little girl, Elisin, be brought in for questioning since she was the first one to touch the summoning letter, and Odah sends a patrol to find her. Zanzibar suggests that, in the morning, they search a derelict ruin of Guga in the southern district.

Valour asks the Manzibar if he can help the party with any supplies, which the Manzibar states, "Sometimes you must do what you can for heroes!" And Zanzibar almost faints after hearing his father's encouraging words. Before Odah leaves to find Elisin, Valour hands her a token of Tyr to give the child as a sign of trust, since a street urchin might flee from law enforcement.

The nextmorning, the party gathers up in the Manzibar's courtyard and see that Elisin is there, and she's got a gosh-darned adorable wooden sword and shield painted up to look like a paladin of Tyr. Valour compliments her attire, but reminds her that "devotion is the real weapon for a paladin!" Senpai noticed me :3

When questioned about the individual that hired her to deliver the letter, Elisin says that the individual was a woman with a lute who called herself "MC." For helping the city, Valour suggests that Elisin needs a reward, so Odah takes the child under her wingto teach her some really kickass fighting styles since the kid looks like she gets in a lot of street fights and needs to know how to kick people's ass a bit. Damn, I wish the cops I knew growing up taught me how to pop a cap in a son of a-

The Manzibar hands the party a potion of healing, a scroll of mending, and a scroll of produce flame to help them on their quest.

The party arrives at the ruined Gugan temple, which is in the Kinchasan projects next to a payday loan store and a used snapfire dealership that doesn't check credit. Zanzibar turns on his detect magic vision and searches the area, realizing that the rusty key from the sewer that Valour found is glowing with abjuration voodoo. Eventually, they discover a secret staircase that leads down beneath Kinchasa, into the underdepths where even the payday loan stores dare not send their collection agents.

The party travels over a hundred feet down, then comes across a sunken fortress! It turns out that the ruins above were just the upper battlements of an ancient citadel for Guga. Valour goes to open the door, but he falls into a pit trap that has two dead goblins and a giant rat at the bottom. The party makes quick work of the rat, but decides "Hey, y'all don't get trapped by no more got'dang'd traps anymore," and they peer inside.

Within, there's a circular room with four dead goblins, one of them is pinned to the wall by a spear. The party investigates the dead goblins, finding nothing on them but dead goblin descriptions. Zanzibar plucks the spear out of the goblin pinned to the wall and sees the word, "GUGA," written in ancient Abyssal. Valour suggests not speaking Guga's name, since names have power. The player with a picture of a plant for a name agrees.

The party explores the sunken castle more and comes across a room with a broken iron cage, a little altar of knickknacks (but no paddywhacks), and a bedroll with a crying somebody wrapped up inside. 🌱 finds some jade dragon statues on the altar and distributes them to the party while Valour opens the bedroll.

A crying kobold is inside!

The kobold's name is Meepo, and boy-oh-boy is he upset right now!

After excessive sniveling, crying, howling, weeping, snot-dropping, wailing, complaining, woe-is-me'ing, and peeing-his-pants'ing, Meepo finally musters the courage to explain his dire situation: he's in trouble with the other kobolds in his clan because a bunch of goblins barged into his room a week ago and snatched their juvenile white dragon, Calcyrx, while under his watch.

Zanzibar grows increasingly worried at this sudden revelation that his hometown has kobolds, goblins, chaos-voodoo, and a dragon underneath it now.

Just think of how the tax brackets are going to shift!

Valour points at a door near Meepo and asks what's behind it. Meepo tells him that the door is where they keep the dragon food, which is a big pile of rats, and the rats are angry and vile and nasty and mean and bitey and aggressive and dangerous.

Valour opens the door.

Nobody is surprised that the rats pile on Valour and attack him, then scatter after Zanzibar casts some ice magic at them. Meepo cheers at Zanzibar's ice magic, claiming that Zanzibar "is one with the white dragons! Like Calcyrx!" Meepo then brings the party to Yusdrayl, his leader, after seeing Zanzibar's display of ice magic.

Yusdrayl is an old lone stone-cold kobold on a boulder-molded throne. She's also dumb as shit. She rebukes Meepo for bringing the party into her court, but Zanzibar casts charm person on Yusdrayl and tells her that he is an agent sent by Tiamat, the dragon god, to reclaim Calcyrx, the kobolds' lost dragon. Yusdrayl praises him, stating "soon the goblins who plague us down here will be driven out," and gives him the key from the stone demon's mouth, telling him to take Meepo with him and find the lost dragon!

All the kobolds cheer and clap and dance at the arrival of this godsent savior!

While leaving, the party finds a kobold dungeon with three goblins locked inside. They interrogate the goblins, who beg to be freed. The goblins promise "safe passage to our leader, Durnn," and "a chance to meet the great Fruitmog!" but the party decides naaaaah on that bullshit, so they slap the lead goblin in the face and leave.

While poking around the citadel, the party finds a room with a demon fountain on one side and a door with a skeletal demon carved on the other. An inscription on the demon door reads "Rebuke the dead," so Zanzibar tries using the key given to him by Yusdrayl, but a scythe swings down from the ceiling and damn near kills the son-of-a-Bar.

Zanzibar rages at Meepo worse than a wet dog in a room where you're not allowed to shake your dog!

After a profuse abundance of anger, Zanzibar goes up to the demon fountain and hits it with his quarterstaff, which kicks up plenty of dust and reveals an inscription in Abyssal on the statue that says, "Let there be fire." Zanzibar speaks the words, and red liquid drizzles out of the statue's mouth, forming in the basin.

Valour and Zanzibar exchange looks.

Valour lights a torch and tosses it into the red liquid as they all run, and a massive blaze lights up from the statue as the liquid burns away. Zanzibar says, "Let there be fire" again, but no more liquid comes out. He uses a coin to scrape some of the liquid out of the dragon's mouth and smears it on the demon door. They ignite the patch of explosive fluid, but that door stays shut like a nun's legs as a magic shield shimmers over it.

Zanzibar has never been so pissed off at a door!

The party continues down a hallway, and they deal with more giant rats. 🌱 freaks everyone the fuck out by popping several of them into masses of giant spores with his creepy mushroom magic, but they continue on, emerging in a room with two pits in the floor—trapdoors that have already been triggered!

At the north end of the room is another one of those fucking demon fountains, but this one has an inscription that says, "Let there be death." The PC's hug the walls as Zanzibar speaks the phrase, which causes a giant cloud of poison to spew from the statue, barely reaching the party.

Nobody got hurt!

That damn near never happens!

The party wants to go through a door, but there's a gosh-derned pit in the way. Valour has a great idea which involves tying a rope around Meepo and flinging him at the door until he's able to latch onto it like a lizard, He does just that, then pulls the door open. Valour leaps across the pit and lands in the room on the other side, which is full of nasty doo-doo garbage stinkiness

AND FOUR GIANT RATS WITH ONE OF THE GIANT RATS BEING A FAT-TEATED MAMA!

Combat begins, and Valour is dogpiled by the rats, dropping him to zero hit points. 🌱 brings him back with healing word, and Valour beats the shit out of the mother rat, Thickey Mouse, before those damned rats just eat his ass again, dropping him to zero hit points. 🌱 uses entangle to try and hold the rats in place while Zanzibar forgets how to hit with ray of frost for a few turns. A rat leaps across the pit at Zanzibar, but it misses and falls to its doom. 🌱 does that weird crush fetish thing of his again with chilling touch as another rat is squeezed into spores of gore. 🌱 then thorn whips a rat towards the pit and drops it to its doom.

Meepo does a fantastic job watching it all and providing moral support by hiding.

Zanzibar crosses the trap once the rats are dead and plugs a healing potion into Valour's face, restoring 9 hit points. They loot the room, finding a dead adventurer named Barzizan and stealing all of the dead guy's dead shit, which fortunately includes a healing potion.

The party then storms off, backtracking to the demon door and demon fountain from earlier. Zanzibar tries rebuking the dead by shouting "Fuck Barzizan!" but the door stays shut. They find another door and enter, only to discover a goblin defense point. A twenty foot long and ten foot hallway in front of them is littered with caltrops, and two goblins hunker down behind a wall, ready to lay down a volley of arrows.

🌱 makes shit really weird by wild shaping into a snapfire and scampering across the ceiling, biting one of the goblin's heads off before it can even react. The other goblin flees, and the party gingerly wades through the caltrops. They turn a corner and find four more goblins hiding behind another wall. The fleeing goblin is with them, and it points an accusing finger at the party.

Taking a brunt of arrows, the party charges, and 🌱 goes full Alien by crawling across the ceiling and just devouring the hell out of the goblins while Valour slices another in half. The cowardly goblin flees again, so the party gives chase, tailing the goblin through a storage room and a pillared hallway. The fleeing goblin is pointing at them from an open door at the end of the hallway, and Zanzibar turns that bitch into a snow cone by finally rolling high damage on his ray of frost attack.

A skirmish erupts as some goblin reinforcements spill forth from the door. 🌱 scampers forward, ready to eat some more goblins, but after peering through the door the goblins are coming through, he sees a BIG. ROOM. FULL. OF. GOBLINS. and he runs his ass back across the ceiling like a bat out of the nine hells.

Everyone retreats as goblins start spilling into the room, and another door bursts open with a second detachment of goblins joining in. The party goes full pants-poopin'-piss-and-shit-everywhere fall-back, retreating through the columned hallway, back through the storage room, blazing past the archery station, and finally hitting the caltrop hallway again.

A hobgoblin leader shouts at the incoming pile of goblins, ordering them to press on, and the PC's manage to slug through the caltrops as the hobgoblin and his sortie emerge on the other side of the caltrop hallway.

The hobgoblin ain't no bitch, and he charges Valour through the caltrops, taking damage as he runs, but his sword clashes into Valour's shield. Zanzibar lays down a magic missile on the hobgoblin and makes his head go ker-plooey.

The tides turn as the goblins funnel in, slowed by the caltrops. 🌱 returns to his normal(?) self and casts entangle, holding the goblins in place. Zanzibar casts sleep, causing several others to collapse. Valour wades through the trapped monsters, swinging his sword and slinging blood all over the place. The party chops through the goblins in a swathe of blood and mayhem.

NO SURVIVORS! NO QUARTER! NO MERCY!

At the end of the five minute brawl, thirteen goblins and one hobgoblin were killed.